Student Life of Second Year MBA Students at the Wharton School of Business

Wharton really exceeded a lot of my expectations over the last year. I came here wanting to get a great career and great relationships, and I got both of those, but I also got executive coaching and personal development. I also got, you know, exposure to so many things that I wasn't expecting. Coming to a place like Wharton, you have incredibly high expectations, not only on the people that you're going to meet, but on the academics, on the extracurriculars, you know, different ventures. It's been fantastic. Every day, the classmates that I sit next to or the professors that I have discussions with, I am inspired. Last night, I had the opportunity to have dinner with Andre Agassi and talk about his foundation and the work that he's done with charter schools. That's incredible. There's absolutely something here for everybody. I think part of that is just the size of the community we have, approximately 850 people per class, really allows you the opportunity to explore all different types of things, but still have that common bond of Wharton. I was elected co-president of Out for Biz, which is Wharton's LGBT club, and it's one of the largest clubs we have on campus. And I'm also co-captain of the rugby team, so we have 100 women on campus who are getting together every week, playing touch rugby. I traveled to China as part of a class for a global immersion program, so we actually took classes for a quarter, learned about the economy, learned about some companies and things that were changing in China, and then at the end of that we actually went and visited for two weeks. It was just a fantastic experience traveling with 30 of my classmates, doing touristy things but also visiting with companies and learning about the economy. Wharton really put together an incredible combination of bringing firms in Chicago that I wanted to recruit at and helping me prepare for the recruiting process, and then it helped me be successful in getting an internship and turning that into a full-time job. I had an opportunity to work with CNBC over the summer, and it was really gratifying to be able to take key learnings from a case I studied in school and actually meet with these firms in business news, interview business leaders, and apply learnings from the classroom to real life to make an impact to my audience. People know what Wharton is. They know what it means to have gone to Wharton. They know what it means from an academic perspective, but they also know what it means from a character perspective. I joined McKinsey last summer, and you joined the summer retreat. You get to see that from the 250 MBA students that were there, more than 50 were Wharton-only, which is far more than any other school out there. I'm bringing a new confidence that I now feel like I've been through this experience. I've had all these opportunities thrown at me, and I've been able to make sense of them in a way that makes sense for me personally, and I've done it alongside some of the brightest people in the world. Wharton's given me the tools and the confidence and really the enthusiasm to go back in the world and say, all right, what's next? I can do this. What's next? And that's exciting.